"Study: 3G phones can make brain hurt"

Yes, that's an actual headline from CNN.com, apparently the foremost website for unbiased news and really stupid taglines. I saw that and took a minute to think about all of the Simpsons quotes that I could, and the best I could come up with is this classic:

Marge: You lost five percent of your brain!''
Homer: Me lose brain? Uh-oh!' [pause for laughter] Why I laugh?

Of course, a close second is this one:
Homer: Man, this is crazy. I hope I didn't brain my damage.

Anyway, on to the point of this post. I can recall a time several years ago when it was commonly believed that using a cellular phone would cause brain tumors. There was a point in my freshman year of high school (well, actually my last year of junior high school, since sophomores were the first year of highschoolers in Kanawha County, where I grew up), when a classmate of mine told a teacher flat-out he was going to get brain cancer for using his cellular phone between classes.

"Feh," said Mr. Frostick and the cell phone makers. "Feh upon you, we say." And, as we all know, they were right. After all, the governments of the world wouldn't allow a company to foist an unsafe product upon us, would they? No, never.

...

But now there's this "3G" technology, which stands not-so-subtly for "Third Generation." When you're done realizing how incredibly unoriginal that is, note that the Dutch technological research institute TNO (I have no idea what that stands for, probably something like "Tulips kick ass") conducted a study on the new system of broadcasting cellular signals.

A quote from the story:

"If the test group was exposed to third generation base station signals there was a significant impact ... They felt tingling sensations, got headaches and felt nauseous," a spokeswoman for the Dutch Economics Ministry said.

There was no negative impact from signals for current mobile networks.

How cool is that? All of those terrormongers from a few years ago might have been without a terror to mong for a while now. But they're going to come out of the woodwork now, that's for sure. I'm sure the "I told you so"s will be loud enough to drown out the sound of a million Dutchmen puking. And that's got to be a really funny noise.

But the best part of the whole thing is that there appears to actually be a benefit to the tingling and the nausea and the what-not. Further down in the story, we see this little blurb here:

However, cognitive functions such as memory and response times were boosted by both 3G signals and the current signals, the study found. It said people became more alert when they were exposed to both.

Presumably, the kinds of signals emitted by cellular phone equipment excites brain cells, causing them to fire more rapidly and yet in a manner that the body can control; the 3G equipment is so powerful that it overrides the brain's ability to cope with the signals and thus causes our autonomic nervous systems to go holyshit, rendering us nauseus and with that just-rolled-a-J tingle. Which, I should point out, sucks.

The obvious thing to do here is to find a way to implant cellular telephone equipment from both the current and 3G formats into the human head, thus increasing our awareness and cognition. As a side effect, we'll all feel high, marijuana prices will plummet, and brain tumors will become vogue.